Denied at Trump rally

3:31am. Tuesday morning

Wanna make God laugh?
Tell him your plans.

So it goes yesterday. I did a few hours of live radio in the morning and then in the afternoon drove to South Bend to see Donald Trump, candidate for the Republican nominee for president. I didn't get in. Shot down like a bowling pin. ​

It wasn't the easiest of drives. They're doing a ton of repaving on I-80 across northern Indiana. It's down to one lane for miles. With four trucks to every human being, it made for a two-hour drive that Google maps says should take one hour and 14 minutes with no traffic.

Well, there was traffic. There weren't nearly as many Trump protesters, though, as I thought there might be. When Trump came to Chicago in April, hundreds of people showed up and started punching each other and cops. It was a melee. As you got off the Toll Road to drive across the Notre Dame campus to Century Center, the first thing you noticed were all the cops. One at every corner and hundreds of them at the Century Center. You knew right then that what happened in Chicago wasn't gonna happen in South Bend. We're Indiana. That's Illinois. 

You also sensed that Trump's rally in the shadows of the golden dome and "Touchdown Jesus" wasn't going to be run nearly as smoothly as Bernie Sanders speech last week on the Purdue campus. Bernie Sanders, as the three or four of you know, had security and handling that in part was led by my sister-in-law who's a captain on Purdue's police department. Carol and her gang at Purdue ran an oiled machine. Tons of cheering college students. One minute to get through security. Hundreds of media, but plenty of electrical outlets patch boxes. And no lines for the bathroom. At Purdue, you could park a hundred yards from the door of the Cordova Center and be on the media scaffold in five minutes. In South Bend, I parked a mile away on a city street and hoofed it across the downtown area. And, of course, still didn't get in.

I had signed up online as a registered media person. It was the only way I would go so Ryan took care of it. The only thing is that the people who ran security and planning at the Trump event didn't take care of figuring out how many people could get into the Century Center. They let too many in too early and by the time I got there, a policeman who looked a little too much like John Candy was standing at the media entrance and wasn't letting anyone in. 

"Park's closed, JED. Moose out front should have told you."

Or something like that. So instead I did the first "JEDcast." I picked up the mp3 recorder that I had in my pocket to record Trump's speech and instead recorded myself talking as I drove out of South Bend on Route 20. Oh well. It's above. It's kind of like my blog to the three or four of you but it's in audio and not prose. Hope the three or four of you like it and if you don't, oh well. There's also a couple photos of people outside the Century Center.